


Wholly Imaginary

by wearemany



Category: Generation Kill, Generation Kill RPF
Genre: M/M, Meta, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-25 23:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/wearemany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a tiny, scarred piece of desire still buried inside, somewhere beneath his breastbone. Hard like Kevlar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wholly Imaginary

**Author's Note:**

> This is about the overlap — and the aftermath — of being in a war, a magazine, a book, a memoir, a miniseries, and the world that's left behind. I consider it the story of two men in context, but others might look sideways and see RPF.

**Camp Pendleton, 2003**

 ****The magazine's fact-checker calls and asks a lot of questions, many of which Nate refers back to the public affairs officer. It was impossible in the thick of things to add national security to his list of concerns, but in the aftermath he has trouble determining where the line should be drawn.

In Kuwait, Nate only thought far enough ahead to weigh where to stow the reporter until he changed his mind and un-embedded himself back to L.A. In Iraq, he had a nightmare that Wright tripped over an I.E.D. while trying to take a photograph. For the most part, he hadn't worried: Evan was riding with Brad, which was as safe a front-row seat as it was possible to have in the midst of an invasion.

The paraphrased quotes the woman reads back to him are so vehement, so angry. They sound like him, though, like things he would say if he could remember how to feel something so strongly.

He remembers Brad. He remembers a night toward the end when he grasped Brad's arm and held tight, one hand flat against Brad’s chest, hoping to fall into something he could barely imagine wanting. Brad didn't let them fall. Brad said, “This is not the time or the place. Sir.”

No one asks him to confirm those details and Nate wonders if eventually they'll fade, too. He wonders a little if he just imagined the whole thing, because even after getting back to Pendleton, neither he nor Brad ever brings it up.

Evan sends an advanced copy of part one, complete with pop stars on the cover and a screaming headline across one corner. A month later, Nate finds all three issues stacked on his parents' coffee table. Twenty-seven years old and officially retired from the USMC, he is declared captain of the Killer Elite.

He goes to Harvard even though they basically say the same.

  
 **England, 2005**

Mail call works the same everywhere. Brad holds up his hand when he hears his last name and someone chucks a brown paper-wrapped package into his chest.

A note card tucked inside the hardcover book says, _Thanks for leading the way - Nate._

There are so many things he never thought to ask. All those days soaking up every detail he saw, every freckle, every flinch. Every observable fact he could file away to try to understand this man he'd follow into any unknown territory.

He hoards Nate's words, pulls every sentence and chapter apart like it's a mission briefing, interrogating his own assumptions, relearning the lay of a land he believed he knew backwards and forwards.

He calls Nate in Boston, a rush of adrenaline in his ears as the phone rings far away. After they say hello and how are you there’s a long pause. Brad says, “I liked your book better.”

Nate laughs, sounding awkward. “That's because this one wasn't about you.”

Brad still can't imagine having the courage required to strip oneself so bare. He wants to say, maybe there’s still time to make sense of this, whatever it is.

He doesn’t. They talk about the weather. They promise to keep in touch.

  
 **Baltimore, 2008**

There's not a lot of Brad in his book for the simple reason that Nate spent most of that month stuck in the front seat of a different Humvee.

When he started writing, he read Evan's articles one last time and then slid them into a folder far back in a drawer. He had his journal. He had a stack of notes from the three weeks when he'd stopped sleeping and started scribbling just to keep himself awake, because even remembering how he wound up in that war was better than reliving it. He wrote his way through an outline and two chapters and a pathetic attempt at a book proposal, and then he seriously lucked out and wound up with an editor who knew how books worked and wasn’t afraid to tell him what he was doing wrong.

This isn't an investigation, his editor said. This isn't journalism. This is a story with a point of view.

So Nate didn't write what he couldn't see beyond his helmet, and he didn't name names of men whose own struggle with leadership required sacrifices and decisions Nate couldn't begin to reconstruct. He refused to flinch from his own worst failings. He’d joined the Marines because it would be hard, after all.

It's a surprise, still, to sit beside the man who made his favorite television show of all time, who told such great stories so deeply entwined with Baltimore's history they may very well have changed the city's DNA. They sit there in David's office watching the first episode and, just like when the Rolling Stone pieces first came out, what takes Nate aback is how much this story is about Brad. Nate's story is so obvious - the naive idealist crushed by the horrors of war. No matter how captivating, Brad's arc is elusive, in print, on screen. In Nate's own memories.

Instead he says, I can't believe I was ever that young. That's what he means to say, but what comes out sounds like a criticism, like he thinks they got it wrong. He believes everything he wrote about memory being personal, fallible, subjective.

He has no idea how to say, who is that man at the middle of your movie? How did I miss so much?

  
 **Camp Pendleton, 2008**

He only looks a little like the LT, but he delivers orders exactly the same.

Behind Brad, all through the theater, Marines hoot and holler and yell at the screen. More than one echoes a "yes sir" or "KILL!" in response to a C.O.'s bullshit moto. In response to an actor.

Rudy and Kocher trained these pretty boy Hollywood types up good. But at the end of the day they still have no fucking idea what it means to be a cold-blooded killer, to trust your life every day to a handful of fellow warriors.

Alex seems harmless enough, and there are worse ways to go down in history than looking like a supermodel. Brad likes how still he can be, how he turned to the handful of waiting photographers and stared out carefully between them, never looking directly at a camera, like all the flashes were bullets and zig-zagging would no more save him on a red carpet than in the middle of a firefight.

The kid playing the LT, Stark - he's quiet in a different way. Softer. Brad wouldn't have made it through the war if those cheekbones were leading the way. But when the camera comes in close, so close you can see real sand and dirt smudged so deep in his pores it's not coming out just because a beautiful British woman yells cut - in those shots, weary and disillusioned and still so much stronger than he ever gave himself credit for, Brad sees the Nate he knows and has to look away.

Espera is sitting to his left and when Brad stares down at his legs for a long moment, Tony nods. Later he says, "I got my own memories to protect," and Brad is shocked how much he wants to hug him for understanding. Everyone has a story about the Iceman, almost all bullshit and now all painted over with Evan's way of seeing things. Evan's not wrong but he's not completely right.

Nate's not coming to this half-assed reunion, to the screening here or tomorrow night up in LA. He made some sorry excuse about how it wasn't his story, was never supposed to be his story. Brad said, "Bullshit," and Nate laughed into the phone. Nate told his side in just the way Brad thinks they all should have expected - easy on everyone else, unsparing for himself.

"Did I really look that boot?" Nate asks when he calls the next week. The images are already starting to fade, the episodes bleeding together like a photograph left out in the sun. Brad did some interviews, elbowed his way through an afterparty, let Rudy drunkenly embrace him while rambling about the karmic resonance of their counterparts living on in celluloid.

He's counting down the days until he leaves again, doing laundry and cleaning out the fridge. "You looked cherry fresh," Brad says, mostly because he loves that sputtering noise Nate makes when he's annoyed. "Right up until you looked as beat down as the rest of us," he amends.

"I never like movies if I like the book," Nate allows.

"It's all make-believe," Brad says. "A wholly imaginary world unto itself."

They both breathe in and out, soft whispers across a nation of functional telecommunications. Nate clears his throat. "Stay safe out there in the real world," he says, a command, and Brad says, "I shall."

  
 **Maryland, 2010**

The house is too quiet, so Nate starts leaving the TV on in the den. Occasionally he picks up the remote and chooses a new channel at random. He lands on some noirish drama in which a Southern woman yells at her sleazy boyfriend. There's something off, though, something surrealist about the storytelling. Nate goes back to the budget summary he's skimming and when he looks up again, he's met with a familiar clenched jaw and blue-eyed stare.

"But Eric," a woman says, and Nate fumbles for the channel guide, for some explanation.

He watches HBO on demand all weekend. He never likes shows like this but as this phase of his life is turning out to be entirely unprecedented, he supposes that makes some kind of sense. It helps, somehow, restores a kind of discipline to his mind. Vampires aren't real. This actor isn't Brad. Nate isn't in the desert.

What's left isn't particularly reassuring - an empty house, a husband who doesn't know how to answer a question as simple as "What's wrong?" - but the leftover fragments are smaller, undeniably real. Obvious.

He's fucking things up. He's fucked up. He's never going to unfuck the parts of his brain that make him a Marine instead of the man he needs to be.

He may have gone months, years without anyone noticing, without it getting in the way of what needs to be done, but apparently he can't stop being haunted just because now he sits down with generals and presents white papers of what can be done to save some other officer's men. To save some other captain.

Somewhere in the entertainment center's drawers there is a box set of DVDs, all seven episodes he only managed to watch once. He doesn't want someone else's face on his memories. He doesn't want to confuse Brad with a leading man so malleable he can play one kind of killer or another with the same calm and deadly glare. He doesn't want to watch those forty days in Iraq unfold yet again and still be unable to stop what happens next.

There's a tiny, scarred piece of desire still buried inside, somewhere beneath his breastbone. Hard like Kevlar. Cold like a lucky horseshoe made of shrapnel against his chest. He wonders. He wonders what would have happened to him if it had happened then. He wonders if it still could.

  
 **Washington, DC, 2010**

Brad has one drink in the USO at National, watching as every westbound flight's status clicks over to delayed and then cancelled, before he calls. Whoever answers at Nate's shiny smart people box - Ray refused to say "think tank" and it stuck - reports he's in meetings until five. Brad has one more beer and takes a cab across the Potomac.

They talk every once in a while. For Brad, it's as much to remind himself why as why not.

Nate comes out of his office in a tie and jacket and a smile, the real one. He looks fit, but tired. He takes in Brad's duffel and jeans and parka and says, "Please tell me you have time for dinner."

They walk through snow to a steakhouse in a fancy hotel and sit in a high-backed booth. Brad orders Scotch. Nate lingers over the wine list, touching the fingers of his right hand to his thumb. He is being uncharacteristically indecisive. Finally Brad reaches out, his wrist knocking against Nate's, and says, "He'll have the same."

Nate sets down the menu with steady hands and doesn't acknowledge the gesture. Brad's imagination has clearly run away from him again.

"Where are you coming from?"

''Quantico."

These rotations are so easy Brad's almost ashamed to take them. It's not so far they couldn't have done this earlier, but Brad doesn't expect Nate to comment on that. They never discuss what they haven't done.

"How are the new kids?" Nate asks.

"As future officers they have a head start on being idiots."

Nate smiles, just barely. "I assume you set them straight."

"No, this time I was cast as the withholding father figure."

"Ahh," Nate says. "And the Iceman taketh away."

Brad grins into his drink. "They all read your book now, you know."

Nate looks surprised, even pleased, before he buries it under a poker-faced nod. He must have known but maybe it's different to hear it first-hand.

Fucking with Nate's head is like keeping yarn from a kitten. "They have discussions about it. Little debates. About you."

Brad tracks small fissures of the internal negotiation across Nate's brow. Does he want to know more than he minds admitting it? Finally: "What do they say?"

They revere him. The more deluded literary aspirants among them scribble twice as hard in their little diaries, dreaming no doubt of their own name on the New York Times best-seller list.

"They say you're lucky to have had a good gunny," he says instead.

Nate says seriously, "I was." He pauses. "I suppose there are junior officers who say that about you now."

"Generally they are disappointed I am not taller. Some people will believe anything they see on TV."

Nate sips his Scotch and the tightness around his eyes flashes away. Maybe, like the jealous edge Brad heard in his voice, it was never there to begin with. "He's on that HBO show now."

"I know," he says, though he means to ask how Nate does. In the world of fucked up things Brad has lived through, having once been played in a TV movie by a Swede who now makes soft-core vampire porn is actually among the least disturbing.

"Mine is on Broadway," Nate says. "Singing Green Day."

"I fucking hate Green Day."

"I know you do."

Brad wonders if those two men are friends, if six months in Africa with giant fans blowing sand in their face was a bonding experience, if it meant something. If it lasted.

Nate opens and closes the dinner menu again, and Brad says, "What's going on, Nate? What's wrong?"

"I --" Nate swallows. "I can't." He seems genuinely at a loss, yet still he manages, "I don't know how to answer that."

Brad knows. Nate's problem is that the war he left will always be his last, will always be there for the reliving. One of the only good things about continued service through a war that never ends is how resilient your body becomes in processing such a unique brand of retardation.

"I don't know," Nate says again.

"You need to get out of your own head," Brad says, and then the goddamned waiter is at his elbow, and Brad says firmly, "We're not ready yet." The guy dips away smoothly, as if he'd been on an entirely different trajectory.

"How?" Nate asks.

Brad thinks, the real problem here is that neither of us believes in being brave.

“Maybe,” Brad starts.

Nate looks up from the table, his eyes so open and asking. Nate who spends every day pointing out the forest to politicians who can’t see beyond their own expedience.

Brad’s job depends on his ability to help officers get their men through the most unimaginable moments. Nate wants Brad to tell him what happens next.

“I think it’s time now,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to gigantic for sharing this very specific mutual meta obsession.


End file.
